1040a Form 2015: Fill & Download for Free

I don't know about subsidies, but the other figures are not even close. Download the 2013 1040A tax form instructions from the IRS. On page 67, it says the tax for a single person making $50,000 is $8425.Now look on page 85. It says these are the percentages of that money spent on different items in the US budget:Defense, veterans, & foreign affairs: 24% ($2022)Social security, medicare, other retirement: 38% ($3201)Social programs (such as welfare): 21% ($1769)Interest on the debt: 6% ($506)Corporate subsidies: Not listed, but they probably go under "Physical, human, and community development: 9%" ($758)A key form of "corporate subsidy" is tax breaks, so they don't show up in the budget. To know what they cost you, you'd have to estimate how much of your taxes would have been paid by corporations instead of by you without those tax breaks, and then subtract the amount that corporations did pay instead of you because they were able to do more business because of those tax breaks. For instance, money spent on basic research used to pay back, on average, at least ten times its cost, and IMHO probably closer to 100 times its cost, based on studies done 40 years ago. (The payback is probably smaller now, but the US govt. doesn't really fund basic research anymore except for DoE, DARPA, IARPA, and NOAA.) This means that a tax break to a corporation that was used on basic research would eventually result in all the corporations of America paying an additional amount of taxes equal to the value of the tax break, times the return on that investment across all the corporations in America who use the resulting technology, times the tax rate. That’s the theory behind corporate subsidies.Theoretically, the current level of subsidies was chosen because you'd have to pay higher taxes without the subsidies, except for state subsidies, which are supposed to be a gain to taxpayers in that state but a net loss to the country. But neither of those show up on your federal income tax.TL;DR: Anybody who tells you they know how much corporate subsidies cost you is lying.ADDED: All of the people who disagree fail to understand that taxes are not a zero-sum game. If a company made $1M taxable profits in 2014, and the government is going to reduce their tax rate for 2015 from 15% to 14%, and the company knew that ahead of time, then that tax cut does not (on average) result in the government getting $10,000 less income, because the company will expand their business in anticipation of 1% higher profits. If you don't understand this, you shouldn't be arguing about economics and taxes, you should be learning about them.

“Would it be feasible to only tax companies (small and large) instead of a personal income tax?”From the standpoint of the government, all that matters is that the government raise enough revenue to fund its operations. The manner in which it does so is not so important.From the standpoint of the economy, the reality that virtually all taxation schemes will favor some sorts of activity and disfavor others, and will have huge effects.It is not possible to simply increase corporate income tax rates so as to allow it to replace the personal income tax. The personal income tax accounts for roughly five times as much revenue as the corporate tax; thus, if we eliminated the personal income tax and increased the corporate tax rates proportionally, the top corporate tax rate would become around 110%, which is absurd. And that’s based on the new 2018 rates, which have yet to be assessed; under the old 2017 rates, the top rate would be in the vicinity of 200%. Clearly, this cannot work.In addition, it would be highly distortive to the economy, grossly disfavoring large traditionally-organized publicly-traded corporations. This is because it would only be business of this type that would be taxed at all; all other business entities would be untaxed at all, except to the extent that they might be owned by a traditionally-organized stock corporation. This is because, at present, the corporate income tax is assessed only only Subchapter C corporations. The vast bulk of businesses—by number if not by revenue or income—in the United States are not organized as Subchapter C corporations. The income of business entities that are not Subchapter C corporations is, in most cases, taxed by passing their income through to their owners (in distributive shares, when there is more than one) and taxing it there. Since most of these organizations are owned by individuals, that means that the business income of these business entities is taxed by the personal income tax code. Thus, a straightforward attempt to simply shift the tax burden from the personal income tax to the corporate income tax would grossly distort the economy by giving certain businesses tax exemption solely on the basis of the manner in which they are organized.In 2015 (the most recent year for which the data is publicly available), US taxpayers reported $7.1 trillion (1040) plus $1.10 trillion (1040A) plus $0.5 trillion (1040EZ) in taxable wages, $0.3 trillion in Schedule C income (income from a sole proprietorship) and $0.7 trillion in Schedule E income (income from Subchapter S corporations and partnerships, as well as royalties and rents). The combination of Schedule C and Schedule E income is a fairly decent first approximation of business income arising from businesses that are not organized as Subchapter C corporations. For 2015, this total was about $1.0 trillion.In 2013, the total income of all corporation that filed any variant of Form 1120, other than passthrough entities, was approximately $1.2 trillion. (Statistics are not yet available for 2015 for this component of US taxation.)What this tells us is that nearly half of all business activity in the US is not subject to the current corporate income tax. Instead, nearly half of taxable business activity is taxed via the personal income tax. Thus, if the goal is to tax businesses generally, clearly the United States would have to institute a business income tax that applies to all business entities and not merely to traditionally-organized corporations.In addition, please note that the total wages in 2015 was about $8.6 trillion. The IRS assessed $1.5 trillion (1040) plus $0.1 trillion (1040A) plus $0.0 trillion (1040EZ) in taxes in 2015 on personal tax returns. In order to get the same $1.6 trillion in revenue from $2.2 trillion in business income requires imposing an average tax rate of about 70%. This would be a ruinously high tax rate. Now, presumably if individuals were no longer taxed on wages, they would accept lower wages for the same work, which would increase pre-tax profitability and thus increase corporate incomes, but estimating this effect is more work than I can be bothered to do right now. I still doubt that it would allow an average business income tax rate below 50%.Such high business income tax rates would be distortive. It’s likely that businesses would take even more steps to minimize taxable income than they currently do, with the current tax rates (21% currently, 39.6% prior to the 2017 tax slash bill). The degree to which they are successful will reduce federal revenues that much more, forcing the federal government to adopt even higher tax rates in order to maintain revenue parity.My conclusion, which you are free to accept or reject, is that, in order to balance the budget, Congress would have no choice but to assess a business receipts tax, an excise tax on wages paid, or a general trade tax (either a sales tax or a value added tax). Business receipts taxation places excessive tax burden on businesses that have high operating or capital costs; a BRT would be the end of American manufacturing unless very carefully structured, and the structuring required to prevent this complicates administration and invites fraud. And both an excise tax on wages (which is really the same as an income tax, just applied indirectly) and general trade taxes will have a disproportionate impact on lower income earners. It’s much easier to structure personal income taxes to provide progressive taxation than it is to do so with these other forms of tax, which is why the US has a progressive income tax and not one of these other forms.Note that before the US had a progressive income tax, it raised most of its revenue from a combination of a wide range of import tariffs and a bevy of domestic excise taxes. These placed a disproportionate burden on the poor, and also made it hard for US producers to find international markets for their products because of retaliatory tariffs. The income tax was introduced to allow the US to reduce its tariff rates, in the hope that other countries would relax their retaliatory tariffs so that American producers could sell their wares internationally. Basically, the income tax (combined with “irrational exuberance”) is what allowed America to explode into the Roaring Twenties, because it made it possible to tear down the restrictive wall of past US tariff policy.

Why can't we increase taxes on billionaires in the United States of America? They have so much wealth that can be used to fund essential public services.The real question, behind your question, is what makes you think you have the right to take more than the already very high percentages of tax from high earners? The top 1% already pay 39% of all federal taxes.It is very easy to search following FACTUAL information: “According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the top one percent of United States taxpayers (1.4 million) paid as much in federal income taxes as the bottom 95 percent (134 million) in 2015.”In short, you want to confiscate their money to pay all the taxes, and then some. What’s your “take”?Also, you are conflating income with wealth. Things that constitute wealth are purchased with after-tax money. You are proposing that double taxation is just fine if it is on the wealthy. In any event taxing wealth is prohibited by the constitution, and requires a constitutional amendment to change. Further, you are proposing that this “new” tax revenue would be earmarked for a specific purpose; earmarking tax revenue does not exist, other than for allocated budget items, and would be problematic in the extreme for revenue.Here is a study list for anyone who proposes such taxation changes:Read the Founding Fathers’ Federalist papers.Read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, especially.Read the instructions for filing a 1040A tax return, attending to the progressive scale of taxation based on income.